Ranger rides a new wave

Ranger Boats are revered throughout the sport fishing world, but they aren’t just floating on that reputation. Seems you can teach an old bass new tricks.

by Tom Hammel

Fishing has come a long way from a pole, a hook and a worm on the riverbank. It is a highly competitive, individualized sport peopled by men and women who share a passion for the lifestyle, who take great pride in their equipment and who express their personalities in their boats.

With its rich heritage in the sport fishing world, and its happy location just three miles from the White River, one of America’s premier angling rivers, and a stone’s throw from some of the country’s finest bass lakes, few companies understand their customers as well as Ranger. Each angler is different, and each angler’s needs are different. So Ranger doesn’t just meet customers midstream—it goes all the way across.

“Every Ranger Boat is built to order; we don’t build to spec,” says S. Keith Daffron, Ranger’s vice president of sales. “We have 40 different base models, but with all the variations in models, colors and equipment, the possible combinations run into an infinite number. And in many cases, they add up to a $50,000 bass boat.”

That’s serious fishin’ right there.

One at a time, times 18
The way Ranger meets this highly individualized demand is by building boats literally from the inside out, one at a time, in a continuous flow with just-in-time delivery of customized subassemblies.

“We build our products on open molds on casters so we can roll them through the process,” he explains. “Our flexibility is built into our mold capacity, so we can take one mold out, insert a different model and build that boat because it is with its mold for three days. The laminate cures in that mold until the third day when we pull it and mate the hull with its deck. Then we can reuse that mold the next day for another boat.

“But it’s not like a person would envision where we batch build. It doesn’t work that way here.”

Ranger produces about 5,000 boats a year this way, roughly 18 each day in what can only be called a low-volume, very-high-mix process.

Today, retail customers typically use Ranger’s online “Build your own boat” design program to choose color schemes and equipment as they build their orders. In “the old days,” it was all done at a dealership with fiberglass color samples and catalogs.

Smile! You’re in Flippin!
Set on 40 acres in the town of Flippin (population 1,253) in northern Arkansas’ lush Ozark Mountains, Ranger now occupies 500,000 square feet of manufacturing and support space in two adjacent plants. Plant 1 operations include subassemblies such as boxes and lids for storage and live well areas on the boats, carpeting, seats and upholstery and pultruded fiberglass components for transoms and stiffeners. These Plant 1 operations feed Plant 2, where assembly takes place.

Ranger boats are essentially two-piece fiberglass shells that are spray laminated, layer by layer, on mated molds. These molds, one deck and one hull, flow through production in parallel until they ultimately come together to form one piece. Decks are built upside down; hulls are formed right side up. As they sit on dollies on the floor, deck molds look like brightly colored, crudely shaped battleship forms with various levels of deck surfaces and a central bridge at the top. However, what appears to be the roof of the ship’s bridge is actually the underside of the bottom of the boat’s passenger well. For the 3-D-challenged, it’s a bit of a trick to learn to see the boat’s true contours at this stage.

But this upside down, inside out logic is perfectly suited to construction. The exposed deck “surface” allows operators full access for installing electrical and plumbing line chases, boxes and other components that will be hidden in the boat’s innards when the deck is finally de-molded and flipped right side up to mate with its hull.

The molds travel with the decks and hulls until the last minute before they are mated. From first spray to final de-molding, this takes three days, so at any point in time there are three day’s worth of boats in some stage of construction in the plant. This three-day inventory drives every subassembly process in the plant, from seats and consoles to wiring harnesses, boxes, lids and trailers. Because customers want their boats and trailers to match, few Ranger boats are built without a color-matched trailer. Hell, the trailers alone are gorgeous.

The hulls, formed right side up, also receive subassemblies including their transoms and stiffeners from the pultrusion shop. To meet demand, the pultrusion shop runs on a three-shift schedule, five days a week. Most other areas of the plant operate on a single-shift workday, although some of these, including maintenance, are staggered between first and second shift. Some subassembly operations, such as installing transoms and stiffeners in boat hulls, are done on second shift to prepare for the next day’s final assembly processes.

Finally, the hull and deck halves “snap” together like a plastic model car body snaps onto its finished chassis. And, as in model cars, this joinery process includes a high-strength adhesive that is carefully applied to every point where hull meets deck to add rigidity and eliminate air voids from the finished structure. Of course, with a full-sized boat, there’s a bit more glue involved.

Smooth flowing, straight shooting
For a plant this size, the maintenance staff is surprisingly small, just 12 in total, including three mechanics to maintain the company’s fleet of 18 trucks. The plant maintenance staff numbers five people, who specialize in various areas of critical demand such as electrical, plumbing, hydraulics, HVAC and pumps. Maintenance here frequently involves pumps.

“We have several hydraulic systems in the pultrusion area and the trailer shop, the areas where we have most of our heavy equipment,” explains Dan Heiskell, plant manager. “However, most most of our PMs are centered around our pump systems supporting our gel coat and chopper gun areas.”

Chopper guns spray a “chopped” fiberglass filament and resin mix onto the hull and deck forms. The resin they shoot demands they be maintained daily, a job that falls to their operators. Ranger contracts its housekeeping maintenance to a third party provider and trains its equipment operators on daily maintenance of their equipment. These steps have helped reduce the demand on Ranger’s existing maintenance staff.

“To be honest, there aren’t many mechanical systems in the boat-building part of the process that have to be maintained daily by our maintenance staff,” Heiskell says. “Much of the daily maintenance is done interdepartmentally operators are responsible for their own daily cleanup and checks. This is why we have such a small maintenance staff. First, there’s not a lot of equipment to break down, and second, if the operator is doing the daily gun cleaning and we’re doing the proper PMs, there’s not a high level of maintenance required.”

The boat decks and hulls are pulled around the plant by motor-driven conveyors, and any issues with them must be addressed immediately to keep the plant moving. That means conveyor issues are a top priority. Motorized conveyors are also used in other operations, such as the box and lid department.

Larger and leaner
As Ranger grows, it increasingly takes advantage of its annual shutdown week in July not just for yearly maintenance and new model changeovers, but also for systems upgrades and capacity expansions. This year Ranger took two weeks to make all the improvements. Lean tools and processes are at play in every systems upgrade.

One of these upgrades in particular has employees cheering. Ventilation systems are critical, especially to the proper curing of deck and hull laminates. Add this to the sweaty fact that temperatures here can hit the mid-90s in early June, keeping workers from overheating is important, too. Maintenance is systematically pulling out pedestal floor fans and replacing them with air conditioning. What’s so Lean about air conditioning? Not only is energy consumption going down, work areas are much cooler, quieter and safer to boot.

The gel coat area is heat sensitive too, and must be maintained at 85 F. This area was also expanded in the July shutdown. “We rearranged our whole gel coat area to accommodate 12 spray booths,” Heiskell explains. “We’re spraying more stripes and patterns onto the boats and we need more space to do it.”

In both decks and hulls, the first layer to be sprayed is the gel coat body color. Customers can select color packages that may require as many as 16 different spray cycles, each of which must be taped off, sprayed and given 20 minutes to cure before the next color can be added. It takes time to realize a customer’s vision of the perfect boat.

Similar initiatives are taking place in the box and lid area, where a cell designed around a mold carousel allows workers to make box lids via closed cavity molding in a space less than 20 by 20 feet, with minimal worker movement required between production steps. As one lid is de-molded, its silicone mold goes back onto the carousel, which carries it around to the fabrication side of the cell in time to be grabbed and used again for the next lid.

Molds on the carousel are coordinated to the day’s boats in process. It works well: this small area produces 200 lids and 100 boxes each day.

This use of Lean tools carries right on through to the finish room. The plant’s wiring shop occupies a cell directly adjacent to the stations where wiring harnesses are installed in the boats. The wiring cell produces all the harnesses needed for the next day’s orders. When completed, the harnesses are kitted together, tested and rolled over to the assembly area in bins. Visual instructions aid wire workers in making up different harnesses. Circuit breaker arrays are now pre-mounted on boards that are then installed on the boats, saving time.

“Premounting our breakers is also a new Lean initiative,” Heiskell says. “An offline operator mounts these on a board that is ready to go straight into the boat. “We check every wire harness before it goes into the boat so we don’t have any issues after it is installed.”

Console assembly is also being “Leaned.” Consoles used to be installed on the boats and then wired with instruments and cables. Now they are prewired adjacent to their installation bay, gauges and instruments are fitted, leaving only simple connections to be made when the console is attached to the boat. Just-in-time wiring.

“The console is an add-on piece so we can kit it up — assemble everything on it, bring it to the boat and just put it on,” Heiskell says. “Before we would have to crawl under the console to make connections and it was a very difficult place to reach. That step alone has saved us 20 minutes of assembly time per boat.”

A major time and floor space saver has been the installation of a monorail conveyor system for boat motors in a warehouse adjacent to final assembly. The warehouse area will hold 800 motors. A new overhead rail by ABB Crane Systems allows easy offloading, storage, staging and just-in-time delivery of motors to final assembly just yards away.

This motor warehousing solution has freed up much-needed floor space, allowing final assembly to expand from four lines to five. This has had immediate benefits over and above “just” added capacity.

“Before, we had 14 models running down one line,” Heiskell says. “Our workers had to know how to assemble 14 different models with umpteen different options. Splitting the line into two lines with 7 models each has made the learning curve much shorter, as well as increasing our capacity.”

When the completed boats roll off the line, hoists lift them into a dunk tank for a wet test of all components. Then the boats are wiped down, shrink-wrapped for shipping and rolled out the back door. From here they are loaded onto trailers for delivery to their eager owners.

Back inside the finish room, another boat rolls off the line. The afternoon sun dances on its ruby hull, flashing off the metal flake finish as if the boat is already on water.

They sure are beautiful, we observe. “Yes they are,” Heiskell agrees. “Everybody should have two of them.”

This article appeared in the August/September 2007 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2007.

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